On a kind of whim one afternoon, while I was on Inisheer, I began looking for the other half of a stone I had found on the rocky shore, amidst all the other stones lying around. The odds of me finding it were very very slim, and yet amazingly after searching the area for about five minutes, I discovered its mate. The two pieces fit together so that barely any crack appeared.
And yet the reunited halves were not one stone again, they were two cracked stones.
We can not put rocks and stones back together. We only break them or make them smaller with hammers. There is no way to make a stone bigger. We can't make them whole again either. We can't make them at all!
But we can make stone walls! We can cause the stones even the ones we've broken to be fitted to become a bigger whole – a beautiful whole.
And in this respect, making walls is very much like making bridges. It is positive inclusive thing. It's like making friends. It's how healing happens too. Building walls is a way of making connections and seeing connections. In the end we discover a pleasing network of joints rather than just seeing cracks everywhere.
